Watch The Wire, then. Story arc is tight over the the entire run of the show. Shows what's possible with format in a way that other shows rarely even try much les pull off.

Very true. It almost was like the creator of the series had it all planned out before the first season even came out. The finale at the end of season 5 tied up everything a little too nicely but, other than that, it was excellent all five seasons and much better than anything else that has been on TV.

Very true. It almost was like the creator of the series had it all planned out before the first season even came out. The finale at the end of season 5 tied up everything a little too nicely but, other than that, it was excellent all five seasons and much better than anything else that has been on TV.

Planning does help usually. It didn't help The Borgias: this third season is the last. It was cancelled even though it is a good show. It just doesn't have many people watching it.

Game of Thrones is an unstoppable, money-making machine for HBO, and it will continue to be, at least until the show catches up to George R.R. Martin when he’s still in the middle of finishing the second sentence of The Winds of Winter. So it’s tough to remember a time when the show was considered a risky pick-up, because if there’s one thing that people hate, it’s TV shows with violence, moral complexities, bad ass female and male characters, dragons, boobs, and penises, all with a devoted built-in audience. HBO had never aired a fantasy series before, with the exception of Sex and the City (no way that many men would devote themselves to Samantha), and at first, the network’s programming president Michael Lombardo was skeptical of the show. Until one glorious day.

“We had this pilot script and we were budgeting it and scratching our head whether we should go ahead and greenlight this,” Lombardo recalls. “And we were trying to figure out the production challenges. We knew it had to be able to stand next to projects in this genre being done on the big screen yet with a more limited budget.” With the decision hanging over him, Lombardo escaped HBO’s Santa Monica office and hit the gym.

As it turned out, [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] go to the same gym.

“And I see Dan on one of the bicycles,” Lombardo says. “He was reading this dog-eared copy of the first book. And it had underscores and yellow highlights [on the pages]. And he did not know I saw him — I was standing on the side. And I thought, ‘We’re going to figure this out. These guys breathe this show in a way that doesn’t happen all the time.’ I found that little window into Dan in that quiet moment, that this is what he was doing in his free time. It was such an acknowledgment of everything I suspected about those guys, and it made me determined to figure this thing out.” (Via)

To recap, if Weiss hadn’t gone to the gym that day and called Pizza Hut instead, this never would’ve happened:

That should be the slogan for every gym in America. “Come here, lose weight, get an HBO show greenlit.”

Surprised at Swedes reaction, I thought season 1 and 2 were slow paced and good but not great.Season 3 however was amazing and one of the best seasons of any show ever.Finally the big battles started and the big names getting taken down, shit getting real in all areas of the land.

Yes. I would say it is a 1A to Mad Men's 1, with GOT being 2. I would have had it only top five had it not been for this last season, which put it up above The Killing and Justified. Sons of Anarchy has already jumped the shark, but I will continue to watch. Boardwalk Empire is coming dangerously close as well. We are living in a great time for cable television bros.

Yes. I would say it is a 1A to Mad Men's 1, with GOT being 2. I would have had it only top five had it not been for this last season, which put it up above The Killing and Justified. Sons of Anarchy has already jumped the shark, but I will continue to watch. Boardwalk Empire is coming dangerously close as well. We are living in a great time for cable television bros.

HBO has done good for a while. Wire, Sopranos, 6 feet under was surprisingly amazing. One of the funniest shows ever in Larry David. Good shit man

Let’s hope that Richard Madden has an easier time wearing a crown in “Cinderella” than he does in “Game of Thrones.”

Madden, who plays King in the North Robb Stark in the hit HBO series, has been cast as the glass slipper gal’s prince in Disney’s upcoming live-action “Cinderella” film, the studio announced Wednesday.

“Cinderella,” slated for a 2014 release, is set to star “Downton Abbey” actress Lily James as the rags-to-riches heroine and Cate Blanchett as Lady Tremaine, her evil stepmother. Kenneth Branagh is directing, and the screenplay was penned by Aline Brosh McKenna (“The Devil Wears Prada”).

Simon Kinberg, who was recently recruited to write a stand-alone “Star Wars” spinoff film, is a producer on “Cinderella.” Kinberg and McKenna (the two are friends) hatched the plan for a live-action update of the classic fairy tale.

“We were thinking of titles and characters that we hadn’t really seen done in a modern, live-action way, and we were kind of stunned that Cinderella hasn’t really been done that way, as a traditional, loyal telling of the story,” Kinberg told Hero Complex. “She’s a great, iconic character, a character that I loved when I was a kid, and I loved the Disney animated movie.”

Kinberg said that people’s familiarity with the story of Cinderella will work in the film’s favor.

“It’s a funny thing ’cause her name, a little bit like Sherlock Holmes or Star Wars or these other franchises, it’s one of those names that people all around the world know the name and intrinsically know the story,” said Kinberg. “It’s just an identifiable, very rootable underdog story.”

Meanwhile, Madden marches steadily on to the end of “Game of Thrones” Season 3, in which Robb Stark’s position as King in the North grows more and more precarious.

“He’s so honest, and he follows his heart so much,” Madden told Hero Complex contributor Patrick Day last year. “He’s in tragic situations, and there’s so much pressure on him, but, my God, he’s so strong.”